Kevon Felmine
Land and Marine Contracting Services Ltd (LMCS) managing director Kazim Ali Sr says an undulating horizontal section of Sealine No.36 may have been responsible for the Delta P event which eventually claimed the lives of four employees earlier this year.
Ali Sr broke down a few times while speaking about the incident, which claimed his only son, Kazim Ali Jr, while giving evidence at the Commission of Enquiry (CoE) into the Paria/LMCS Diving Tragedy at the International Waterfront Center, Port-of-Spain, on Monday.
Ali Sr stuck to his witness statement provided to the CoE that, in hindsight, there had to be a Differential Pressure (Delta P) hazard on Sealine No.36 that Ali Jr, Christopher Boodram, Fyzal Kurban, Yusuf Henry and Rishi Nagassar worked on.
The divers were replacing the defective portion of the riser at Paria Fuel’s Berth No.6 in the Pointe-a-Pierre harbour on February 25 when a Delta P event sucked them into the 30-inch diameter pipeline. Only Boodram survived the ordeal after crawling and swimming to the opening in the pipe.
Ali Sr said the Delta P hazard caused the inflatable plug installed in the line to move. The inflatable plug kept gas from the pipeline out of the hyperbaric chamber the men were in.
Ali Sr did not know what caused the pressure from the top to the bottom plug but believed it could have been related to an undulated pipe and air trapped there.
He said when LMCS installed the plug, there was liquid underneath. However, during the 10-day break between installation and resumption of work, the conditions might have changed.
He said if he knew the pipeline was undulating, he would have included a step of measuring the pressure on the risers at Berth No.5 and No.6, which Sealine No. 36 connects, in the Method Statement. If the pressure readings were unequal, he would have equalised them before removing the plug. He contended that a level line would have equal pressure on both sides.
Ali Sr said the diagram Paria provided for Sealine No.36 showed the level of the sealine. Explaining it, he said there were concrete bags at the foot of the riser to prevent it from sinking further than the rest of the pipeline. Because the pipe is concrete-blanketed and the riser coated, the weight sank it lower than the rest of the line, creating an undulation.
“Where it gets perplexing in this case is not just at the riser, because Christopher (Boodram) referred to two air pockets. If it were just this one, you would have one air pocket, so there must have been some more undulation in the pipeline,” Ali Sr said.
When asked by Paria’s lawyer, Gilbert Peterson, SC, if LMCS tried to inspect if the line was level, he said LMCS could not determine this, as the horizontal section was encased in concrete and covered in the mud under the sea.
While Peterson presented a bathymetry survey in support of his claim that LMCS should have known the line was not level, Ali Sr said it showed only the depth of the water but not the pipe.
Peterson questioned Ali Sr on whether LMCS workers checked the plug on recommencing work on February 25.
Ali Sr said it held its position while the chamber remained operating, which suggested it was stable.
Ali Sr said later on that there were two meters continuously monitoring air quality in the habitat.
He said hydrocarbon fumes from heavy fuel are five times heavier than air and would sink to the chamber floor if they came out of the pipe. He added that the flashpoint was so high that very little hydrocarbon would escape.
Asked about clearing the line to begin work, Ali Sr said LMCS did not clear the entire line but enough to achieve a 30-feet clearance to insert the inflatable plug. He said LMCS found it safer to install the plug against a backdrop of liquid to prevent it from falling into the pipeline if something went wrong. He could not say how many barrels of oil LMCS had cleared to facilitate the work.
